just brew it! wrote:(which will experience a surge in popularity when someone finally finds the critical hole in Blu-Ray DRM and facilitates easy ripping of Blu-Ray titles).

Wait wut???? This can be done now.

I was under the impression that it was still a cat-and-mouse game with revised DRM being deployed periodically to thwart the ripping tools. Probably can't discuss much more than that without hitting Rule #1.

The years just pass like trains. I wave, but they don't slow down.-- Steven Wilson

just brew it! wrote:I was under the impression that it was still a cat-and-mouse game with revised DRM being deployed periodically to thwart the ripping tools. Probably can't discuss much more than that without hitting Rule #1.

Flatland_Spider wrote:If anything, midrange stuff will look more like a mainframe.

It's a "sink hole". Everything look fine until the bottom falls out, like that unlucky guy in FL a few weeks ago, where they didn't even bother looking for the body.

Middle-ware still sucks, but is catching up. Fewer and fewer need one big expensive thing to stay up 24x7; more and more can tolerate many cheap white-boxen being down at a time without (apparent) loss of service. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Rackspace [admittedly, references needed], etc., spec out stateless commodity servers that are hot-(un)plugged when the racks fall below a percentage of up/online machines. They don't even bother opening the dead boxes to find out what went wrong anymore -- that takes skills (and usually a screwdriver).

In the new Star Trek movie, there is a bridge officer with a big glowing disk on the back of his head.

It's either a liquid cooling heatsink or a heat spreader. Star Trek has a history of being way ahead of the times, so for my answer to the question, I'm going with intracranial assist chips with water cooling.

Except for people who watch "reality TV". In that case, the 23rd century can only justify giving you cold-cathode lighting, simply because you ain't generating enough heat to warrant any kind of cooling apparatus.

Edit: Oops, I thought you were asking about the next 2-4 centuries. Silly me!

MarkG509 wrote:Middle-ware still sucks, but is catching up. Fewer and fewer need one big expensive thing to stay up 24x7; more and more can tolerate many cheap white-boxen being down at a time without (apparent) loss of service. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Rackspace [admittedly, references needed], etc., spec out stateless commodity servers that are hot-(un)plugged when the racks fall below a percentage of up/online machines. They don't even bother opening the dead boxes to find out what went wrong anymore -- that takes skills (and usually a screwdriver).

Midrange servers and Middleware are two totally different things. Middleware is software designed to broker connections between system, like JBoss and Websphere. Midrange servers are commodity servers, usually x86.

I've seen services built like that. 400 boxes, and they just run them until they die. However, none of those are ultra critical, life or death type stuff. No one is going to die because Facebook glitched, and they can't upload a cat pic. Those services can have a little downtime. People will be inconvenienced, but they'll get over it.

Mainframes are designed to never go down and to be extremely paranoid about errors. They are so paranoid that they will run the same computation on two different CPUs then compare the two to make sure there are absolutely no errors.

Midrange server setups already look like mainframes setups. There are compute nodes that are nothing but NICs, RAM, CPU, and a just enough storage to boot an OS or hypervisor, and the bulk of the storage will be on a SAN connected via an HBA. This is exactly how a mainframe is setup, with different terminology. The difference is in the reliability of the software and hardware. Midrange stuff is just not built to the same standards as mainframe stuff.

Midrange stuff can start co-opting mainframe features, but then it would be mainframe stuff.

Flatland_Spider wrote:Midrange servers and Middleware are two totally different things.

I totally agree. I'm focusing on revenue growth, and it's affect on the direction. Flat, or even slightly declining, revenue is death to a public company. Bean counters, who rarely understand anything other than their beans, over-react -- "Ready, Shoot, Aim!" was a recent quip against IBM's new CEO; Dell had a bad year and wants to go hide in private.

There's several sub-topics here (any of which could hijack this thread, or merit their own threads). One is the bottom-up erosion of the high-end: you highlight the pressure from midrange, while I see that pressure eventually/soon reaching all the way down to the mobile space. Retrying (or running twice and cross-checking) instructions versus transactions achieve the same effect once the middleware can deal with it. The resiliency built into today's mainframes is rapidly creeping down to midrange systems, and that trend will accelerate as companies fight for market share.

I just had an idea for an extremely low-power x86 CPU inside a phone, but one that has great potential. You could take that phone and put it into a bigger desktop, the back of the phone will open up where a heat sink inside the desktop can make direct contact with the CPU inside the phone (auto-applying thermal paste, perhaps). The desktop can contain full-sized components just like we're used to.

The problems I could foresee would be how the phone interfaces with the components inside the desktop, the size and shape of the phone and if it would interfere with the alignment of the heat sink and the CPU, and finally what about the inevitable issues with potentially overheating phones.

Probably not for another 10+ years, though. And probably a much better implementation than this novel idea of mine.